Inventing new ways to do what needs to be done

By David Hunter, Publisher

Meditation, it has been said, is the mother of insight.

One famous example proves the veracity of that proverb. In 1665, with bubonic plague running rife, a student at Cambridge University by the name of Isaac Newton retreated to his home in the countryside. Sitting under an apple tree in the summer of 1666, he reflected on what made an object at rest (an apple) move in a particular direction (towards the earth) when it broke free from the tree.

The rest is physics history – past, present, and future.

With schools, colleges, and universities around the world now closed, to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, students have an uncommon luxury: time to ruminate. Recognizing this, a professor of astronomy at Williams College wrote to the editor of The New York Times recently, expressing the hope that “the current situation leads one of today’s scholars to make a breakthrough” as consequential as Newton’s. Time will tell.

As meditation is the mother of insight, so necessity is the mother of invention. In an effort to grapple with new realities imposed by COVID-19, individuals, families, community groups, organizations, institutions, and governments around the world are, by necessity, inventing new ways to do what needs to be done.

So are businesses, including ours. 

To ensure that we at the Gumnut Group can continue to publish timely, accurate, and detailed information about coming events in Haddonfield, despite the certain loss of some advertising revenue to our print magazine, we’ve gone digital.

Our new digital product — Haddonfield [dot] Today – will not replace the printed product that Haddonfield residents and business owners receive in their mailboxes every two weeks. Rather, the print and digital versions will complement each other.

This is new territory for us. We’ve avoided the digital world for one very good reason: we’ve never been able to figure out how to inhabit it profitably. (Incidentally, we’ve never meet a publisher at the local level who has.) But, given the times, we have decided to try.

Perhaps the necessity of taking a novel approach in the current situation might lead to the invention of a new – and financially viable – way to spread the word about what’s on. Time will tell.

We hope you like what you see, and that you will send comments and suggestions for improvement.